A fresh look at quantity sensitivity in Spanish

The present article aims to examine, with the help of a made-up-word test, the psycholinguistic reality behind the generalizations assumed to govern the stress system of Spanish nonverbs, paying special attention to quantity sensitivity. I will argue that the apparent quantity sensitivity of Spanish nominals is a historical heritage, not an active constraint, and that the stress system of Spanish does not show rule-based behavior; stress is rather the lexical property of words, and the system works on the basis of analogical extensions.